How do you like your turkey? With arsenic? Or without?

This story in the LA Times by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Deborah Blum should put you in a write-your-congressman kind of mood.

Blum reports that poultry farmers are allowed to supply feed laden with a pesticide called Roxarsone to their birds, and this product contains arsenic. Once digested by the chicken and turkeys, it makes their flesh pink and fresh looking. And then you eat it.

According to Blum:

A 2006 project by a Minnesota-based advocacy group, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, found the poison in 55% of chicken parts (breast, thighs and livers) tested. Just to give you a few more numbers: The highest amount — 21.2 parts per million — occurred in generic brands; the least in organic products.

So where is the FDA? Blum says the agency allows arsenic in meat at a level 5,000 times higher than than the EPA allows arsenic in drinking water. At low levels, it’s a carcinogen. At high levels, it’s a poison. Think about that the next time your toddler asks for chicken tenders.

So aside from writing your member of Congress, what to do? Blum’s advice: “Eat vegetarian, eat organic, buy from some of the producers that have renounced the additives, such as Tyson or Perdue Farms.”

And pick up a copy of Blum’s excellent book, “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.”